Misanthrope's Corner - personal account: a life of avid reading, brought on by childhood experiences - Brief Article

National Review, Sept 17, 2001 by Florence King

Boy, did I strike a nerve with my "Igno" column. The letters poured in, and every one was positive. Not only did you outdo yourselves in your impassioned support, but some of the hair-raising examples you cited from your own contact with the breed were better than mine.

The letters were also notable for a corollary subject that kept popping up. Many of you asked what caused me to become such a voracious reader. I'm often asked this, so I might as well answer it here and now, but if it isn't the inspirational story you expected, don't say I didn't warn you.

There was nothing unusual about my childhood reading: Nancy Drew, Lassie Come Home, My Friend Flicka. Nor was there anything unusual about my pubertal reading: GWTW, Forever Amber, Anya Seton, Frank Yerby.

It wasn't until high school that I turned into a case study for a psychiatric conference on bibliomania. The impetus was not high school itself-I was no more miserable than anyone else and a lot happier than some-but an oppressive situation at home. Namely, my grandmother's collection of long-suffering Southern female martyrs who sat in our kitchen talking about how they worked their fingers to the bone "doing for" others without a thought for themselves.

Women in general are susceptible to the selflessness trap, but Southern women get carried away by it, seeing themselves as the plantation mistress going forth to do good on a grand scale. Whilst others sleep, she is abroad in the night, tirelessly nursing the sick and being acclaimed an angel of mercy by adoring throngs of invalids. The reality of her actual social class has nothing to do with it: In her mind's eye she's the lady of the manor and that's that.

I thought of them as the "moist women" because the glow of self- sacrifice seemed to condense on them, though in view of their broad experience with urinals it might have been something else. Most of them had bedridden relatives, usually husbands, whose problems required some form of regular, hands-on help. When I got home from school they would be knee-deep in discussions of "seepage" and "drainage," blissfully unaware of the one-upmanship that pulsated through their accounts. It was obvious that the woman who merely had to empty her husband's urinal felt inferior to the woman who had to change her husband's pads, who in turn felt inferior to the champ who catheterized her father-in-law four times a day.

I recoiled from them with every fiber of my budding womanhood but I didn't know why until the day one of them turned to me with a mournful smile and said, "A bright girl like you should go to nursing school."

That's when I started reading as if my life depended on it-because it did. My instincts told me that if I read enough books, I wouldn't be "like them," so I hurled myself at the classics, starting with Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and Madame Bovary.

My reading had no plan or pattern to it. When the martyrs discussed reaching down somebody's throat to pull out a swallowed denture, I swallowed A Tale of Two Cities, Dombey and Son, and Les Miserables. When they held forth on the various stones and clots somebody had "passed," I took in The Return of the Native, Vanity Fair, and McTeague.

We were shackled together in neurotic symbiosis; when they stepped it up, I had to step it up. Things got critical when they abandoned seepage 'n' drainage for the greater glories of stoppage 'n' blockage. An argument over whose husband's bowels were in worse shape led to a volley of one-upmanship between Ole Miz A, who merely had to empty her husband's bedpan, and Ole Miz B, whose husband wore a bag. But just as she was preening herself, Ole Miz C chimed in with the news that her husband was so impacted that she recently had had to start excavating him "by hand" every third day.

"The doctor said there was a long- handled instrument he could get me, but an iced-tea spoon works just fine."

War and Peace, Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, Anna Karenina, Death in Venice, The Charterhouse of Parma, The Red and the Black, Therese Raquin, Nana, Germinal, Jude the Obscure, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Main Street, Babbitt, Elmer Gantry, Jean-Christophe, Fathers and Sons, On the Eve.

I told them about that last one out of sheer devilment, just to see what they'd say. "It's about an aristocratic Russian girl named Elena who marries a Bulgarian revolutionary named Insarov, but he dies of TB and she becomes a nurse in the Crimean War."

I figured it would launch a rousing seminar about gangrene, but to my surprise they responded with expectant little smiles. I realized why when Granny voiced their collective thought.

"An army hospital is the best place in the world to catch another husband. Wounded soldiers get a pension."

Yes, indeed. A smart girl who played her iced-tea spoons right could catch a husband who had only three inches of intestine left, spend the best years of her life scooping him out every hour on the hour, and wind up being called an angel of mercy instead of a dominatrix.